2020-03-14 18:11:37

Dark wrote:

I am also not entirely sure how much the game has via quests, other things to do and so on. I do gather the game has a lot of things to explore in the world and many items to look at, which is awesome as far as it goes. The players guide does mention something about "puzzles and challenges", but other than the obvious ones directly related to hacknslash, or simply getting experience for the sake of exploration, I'm uncertain what is exactly around.

This is particularly of interest to me since I'm a bit of a questing fan, and while I am always happy to just explore and poke things, and I'm more than happy to treat combat as an optional extra, , I do like tasks to do and to feel that I'm doing something useful.

I think the concept to foreground is "structure". Quest systems in many games exist to provide structures for players to work within, including specific goals to achieve. Whether that's attractive depends on one's personality, I think. Many people thrive in a more structured environment, others chaff against its restrictions. TriadCity is extremely "open" in the sense that you're not forced into specific paths, but instead are left to invent or choose or discover them for yourself. Some people really love this lack of constraint, others find it frustrating because they're not sure how to proceed.

So the narrow answer is "no", there isn't a formal quest mechanism (yet - see below). Yet there are many "puzzles and challenges" which act like quests. Herbalists for example must know where to find the herbs they use, some of which are quite esoteric and difficult to come by. They may be not only difficult to locate, but also dangerous to acquire. They could be guarded by NPCs, or there could be Indiana Jones style puzzles to solve to reach them at all. We often structure these challenges to require groups of players with complementary skills. You may need a Thief to pick the lock to get you into the garden and you may require brawny bodyguards to fight off the guardians. Or you may just pay people to get it for you. We have one veteran Thief character who's highly adept at providing hard-to-get herbs for Herbalists.

We're currently working to provide more of these challenges which can be solved by individuals without groups. And we're discussing with veteran players ways to enhance our existing, quite primitive "treasure hunt" mechanism where NPCs give you mini-quests to find things for them. I don't know where this will go over time. Since you have a strong interest in questing, please jump in! The discussions are in the forums.

TriadCity home page
TriadCity on Facebook
TriadCity on Twitter
triadcity.smartmonsters.com 9095 [secure] 9094 [insecure]

2020-03-14 18:18:22 (edited by TriadCity 2020-03-14 23:22:28)

Dark wrote:

Indeed, I wonder how Triad city compares to a game like Frandom, which is pretty much a giant interactive fiction game, with so many tasks, questions and things to discover it's not funny, where combat is quite possible, but very much not the focus (you don't get any xp in Frandom for slaying monsters or the like).

I don't know! Frandom sounds interesting, I'll try to check it out, or maybe one of our players knows of it. Your description of it sounds pretty similar to how we think about "puzzles and challenges" per my previous post. I'll ask around.

In TriadCity we face a "critical mass" problem where enabling the more advanced NPC AI as well as the puzzles and quest-like challenges requires really significant infrastructure. So there are competing priorities for our world authors to balance: more world versus AI behavior versus player puzzles with greater details. There's an author's blog about it here:

https://triadcityauthors.blogspot.com/2 … ot-of.html

TriadCity home page
TriadCity on Facebook
TriadCity on Twitter
triadcity.smartmonsters.com 9095 [secure] 9094 [insecure]

2020-03-14 18:23:01

Dark wrote:

Lastly, I am wondering about the other worlds mentioned on the smart monsters website such as midgard and Dungeon. Are those accessible from within Triad city itself?
There is mention of them from within the game help, but nothing about them in triad city. IS there a command to switch worlds? or are those only playable via the website for now..

Yes. Midgaard, Dungeon, and worlds to come are all accessible from inside TriadCity. As "retro" worlds, Midgaard and Dungeon can be reached through portals inside the Museum of Technology and Society in the Southern Third. Future worlds will have their own gateways. You'll be able to play all of these as standalone games, or as specialized neighborhoods within TriadCity.

Which could be another form of quests: find all 585 points in Dungeon, gain an interesting TriadCity spiff. That's in the works now.

This has been a lot of info, I hope it's what you're looking for!

TriadCity home page
TriadCity on Facebook
TriadCity on Twitter
triadcity.smartmonsters.com 9095 [secure] 9094 [insecure]

2020-03-14 23:37:23

Hi, and thanks for all the answers, that will definitely help me both to decide what I'm doing in the game, and to put together a proper database entry, something which really should have been done long since.

As regards quests, for me it isn't so much to do with structure in a game, as feeling a sense of actually accomplishing something and doing some good in the world.

If peasant jo tells me that the crows are eating all his crops and to go and kill 20 of them, well even though I know from a mechanical perspective this is  just an excuse to get my character to fight lots of low level monsters, I am still under the impression that I'm actually doing a good deed for someone. Heck, even though I know lots of other characters will be doing the same actions and fighting the same crows since once the quest is complete my! character will not be able to do it again, from my perspective, I can imagine that I've actually solved the problem and my character has done some good in the world over all.

Of course, the bigger, more dire and more difficult the task, the more accomplishment I feel, , especially if said task involves some sort of ongoing story or evolving set of circumstances, for example if it turns out the crows are far from normal crows, but some sort of weirdly created magical hybrids which are the result of dangerous magical experiments which I then need to look into etc.

For me, it's all generally about feeling as if I'm having a successful effect on the npcs around me, and yes being a hero, or at least helping people out, indeed I will often do as many quests as I can just for the sake of  completing them, even when the rewards don't stack up or my character is too high a level.

of course, I know Triad city has player interactions as you describe, and I'm certainly not against helping other players when I can, but I've found in the past player interactions feel less like a story or helping people out, and more like trading or carrying out commissions, plus I do admit I am a bit of a solo player anyway and prefer things I can succeed at  on my own merits.

It's actually odd, tell me in a game to go and slay 1000 goblins and I'll be thinking "oh no, that sounds like a lot of grinding", but tell me that I need to go into the goblin's lair to recover something that was lost or stop a goblin invasion or the like, and I'll be quite happy.

This doesn't even just affect combat quests either, I'm far more likely to practice my fishing skill 50 times if mistress Nora has asked me to find her 10 chubs and a marlin, than just because I need to try fishing 50 times to improve the skill, indeed I'm more likely to! try and improve the skill if I know someone will want my fish, than just for it's own sake big_smile.

anyway, since I'm also a big fan of exploring and simply wandering around  to experience what a game has to offer, I think I will find a fair few interesting things in Triad city to try out either way.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2020-03-15 00:54:00

Hey thanks so much for sharing your thinking re quests in such detail, the perspective is extremely helpful. Would you mind if I were to copy and paste your explanation to our forum thread where players are talking out loud about whether and how to do quests in TC? Crediting you of course, with a link back to this page.

Looking forward to your participation!

TriadCity home page
TriadCity on Facebook
TriadCity on Twitter
triadcity.smartmonsters.com 9095 [secure] 9094 [insecure]

2020-03-15 05:15:34 (edited by Dark 2020-03-15 10:44:45)

Hi.
Feel free. Actually my explanation was sort of based on a long discussion we had in This thread, when someone was against the very idea of quests in computer games, and we debated the issue.

Btw, as to your "none visual world" question.
I'm personally not a fan of doing any kind of "welcome to blind land! here every blind person lives happily with their blindity." type of area, nor yet any kind of "you lose your vision but wait! you have super hearing that is just as good and are suddenly dare devil" type of idea.

As soon as you start pushing the "blind!" thing, you push the idea that blind people are exclusively different, and that being "blind" is the most important thing about their identity, indeed it's still rather depressing that most blind characters in literature or film are either not really blind blind super heroes, who have an awesome magic piece of technology/sensory power which makes them effectively not blind at all, or helpless little tiny tim knockoffs who cannot dress themselves, either way, very different sorts of humans from regular people, (ever noticed how Jordi la forge was thee least fleshed out character in Startrek Tng? Or that his blindness almost never actually caused him problems at all because of his magic car filter?).

What might be fun however, is to change the idea from "blind", specifically, to "none visual."

So, how about creating a part of the game, be that a neighborhood of triad city, where a player's vision is useless and they're forced to use their other senses in a way that does not make them "blind", but just forces them to explore things without vision.

I'm not thinking of the classic lightless labyrinth (cliche city), My thought here, is how about an area where all of the objects, buildings, and even npcs are entirely invisible. The player can still see, however looking around visually, all they get is a description such as "you are in a field", or at most "you are in the north/south of a field."

However, going the wrong way, the player walks into an invisible wall. As the player improves at touch and hearing skills, the player will soon be able to sense the air currents that tell the player whether they are in a corridor, street or room, and hear  the  moving of npcs (at least when those npcs aren't being actively stealthy or standing still).. if the player "touches the area" the player will try and feel their way around the place, though of course this is likely to annoy any npcs they run into and possibly get them attacked.

If it occurs to the player to take a stick with them, this unlocks the "cane" command, which can identify some objects, however even if the cane identify's an object, the player will need to touch it to get an exact idea, EG, "Cane" "You feel a poll, "touch poll, this is a stout poll of metal about six inches thick set into the pavement, you find a wooden sign board bolted halfway up that you cannot read."

The player can of course talk to npcs, however only gets the voice identified until the npc has introduced themselves, and only gets location information if an npc has actually told them what a location is, or if they've used another command such as "smell", for example the player might identify a cafe by the smell of cooking food, although that could equally apply to the cafe's kitchin.

As per my discussion of quests, there would also be a definite point in this area, perhaps some items a player had to find, and had to find entirely by using their other senses or trying to find the correct npc to talk to, however the basic navigation of the area would put the player into a position where they would need to both practice skills to progress, and also  expend a lot of time on their other senses to gain basic information about where they were.

This would also then effectively give everybody an experience of what it would be like to operate without vision, including a little of the real life neusence factor, without having to mention the word "blind" once, indeed players who like exploring and puzzles might well enjoy that sort of area for it's own sake and for the need to find out information in an alternative way.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2020-03-15 13:26:07

I Trenton Matthews, also agree with @dark's thoughts with said area of darkness.

I wish sighted folks in the real world could learn about that one day.

2020-03-15 17:09:23

Dark wrote:

What might be fun however, is to change the idea from "blind", specifically, to "none visual."

So, how about creating a part of the game, be that a neighborhood of triad city, where a player's vision is useless and they're forced to use their other senses in a way that does not make them "blind", but just forces them to explore things without vision.

...

As per my discussion of quests, there would also be a definite point in this area, perhaps some items a player had to find, and had to find entirely by using their other senses or trying to find the correct npc to talk to, however the basic navigation of the area would put the player into a position where they would need to both practice skills to progress, and also  expend a lot of time on their other senses to gain basic information about where they were.

This would also then effectively give everybody an experience of what it would be like to operate without vision, including a little of the real life neusence factor, without having to mention the word "blind" once, indeed players who like exploring and puzzles might well enjoy that sort of area for it's own sake and for the need to find out information in an alternative way.

+1. This is how our thinking has been evolving. It's not about "being blind", rather that the sense of vision simply doesn't exist there, say through evolutionary adaptation to particular circumstances. Rooms would be described principally through smell, sound, or touch; we'd either give players their choice of dominant sense, or perhaps not - perhaps we choose one for them when they make their character. The world itself would be adapted, where, say, signage is based on smell.

This hasn't been our focus while we're getting Dungeon ready, but it is intriguing to brainstorm what a world like this would imply.

TriadCity home page
TriadCity on Facebook
TriadCity on Twitter
triadcity.smartmonsters.com 9095 [secure] 9094 [insecure]

2020-03-17 14:31:11

What is Dungeon going to be?

2020-03-17 14:46:11

Dungeon is an adaptation of the original 1977 edition of the infocom adventure Zork, the one which famously featured the Grue.
So, it's a full on, hard as heck text adventure with puzzles that will make you want to tear your hair out big_smile.

Ironically, I first played it myself when experimenting with interactive fiction in 2004 or so, I enjoyed the atmosphere, but I confess the illogical puzzles and parser of doom didn't grab me as much personally.

Then again, whilst I love quests and accomplishments, I slightly got put off interactive fiction after too many

"put cup on table."

"I don't know how to put"

Type of situations, or occasions when, oh look I should've unlocked the locked door by pushing the bubblegum into the keyhole, then using the bycicle pump to pump up the bubblegum, then filling the resultant buble with liquid nitrogen and lighting it on fire by striking the flints against the tree which results in the lock blowing off the door.

Wow! how stupid I am for not thinking of that oh so obvious solution!

for myself, whilst i'm glad dungeon is being added to the Triad city line up, and am glad I played the classic myself, I'm actually rather interested in midgard, since that is something I haven't tried before, and it sounds fun for a bit of light, monster slaying relief.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2020-03-17 17:59:30

Dark wrote:

Dungeon is an adaptation of the original 1977 edition of the infocom adventure Zork, the one which famously featured the Grue.
So, it's a full on, hard as heck text adventure with puzzles that will make you want to tear your hair out big_smile.

Spot on.

And proving far more difficult to implement than imagined, as the many puzzles are one-offs and essentially arbitrary.

SmartMonsters' co-founder Gary Smith was one of the small army of hackers who back in the day added features and fixed bugs in one of the original Dungeon/Zork branches. As we near completion of our emulation, we're tempted to produce a fully-updated version with a modern NLP parser and all the detail complexity we can add via the TriadCity platform. That would reduce its seeming arbitrariness while providing reasonable clues to the puzzles. It would keep the several irrational mazes though, which are part of its charm.

FYI when Dungeon is complete we plan to next emulate the granddaddy text adventure game, "Colossal Cave Adventure", often abbreviated to "ADVENT" on systems of the day.

ADVENT and Dungeon are the ancestors of every subsequent MUD. Even the term "MUD", or "Multi User Dungeon", highlights the lineage, as the first MUD (Trubshaw and Bartle's "MUD 1") was intended to widen the adventure experience by making it multi-user instead of single-user. When this is all complete, the "universe" we're building will allow players to experience the history of this particular text-based tradition, from ADVENT to Dungeon to Midgaard to TriadCity.

TriadCity home page
TriadCity on Facebook
TriadCity on Twitter
triadcity.smartmonsters.com 9095 [secure] 9094 [insecure]

2020-03-25 20:32:00

Okay I've now got to level 4, had a chat with various helpful players and done a lot of wandering.
I am liking the world so far in terms of writing and descriptions. At the moment I'm still not entirely sure on skills, since you need a teacher to teach you. I found one and learned the learn skill, but as to other skills, well we'll see. Likewise, I'd like to find out a bit more about roles before choosing, but when I wandered into the thief's guild, though there were several npcs, there was little info on actual thieving.

Oddly enough, I'm less interested in combat in the game, since combat wise there are plenty of games to play, heck if I want to run around and slay things, Erion is proving fun for that right now big_smile.

On the other hand, I am interested to see what other roles like the various medical specialisations, theives etc doo, but I am gathering that Triad city is a far more laid back experience so I'm content to wait and see (indeed a laid back experience is sort of what I want right now).

Okay, a couple of brass tacks points about the mud interface, which is after all what this topic was supposed to be for big_smile.

First, I am really wishing Triad city a chat history command like several other muds which would reprint the last 10 or so messages from a given chat channel.
When wandering around, or heck just when waiting for my energy to regenerate, I am quite often missing chats or tells, and I don't want to be unintentionally rude.

I gather that on the web interface the chats are in another window, but for a mud where the hole thing comes together, a history command might be nice.

I also wish the "reply" command could be used to reply to the last tell you received, just to speed up always having to type the player's name.

I also wonder if it might be possible to have notifications when you earn experience in text? I gather that these are in an xp bar in the web interface, but sometimes when playing the mud, I'm never sure when an action does or does not give me XP, and it might be nice to get notified, since at the moment if it weren't for the getting started page, I wouldn't realise what would give me XP.

Of course, if this changes and I was say getting XP every minute or so, then maybe I might feel differently, still if XP notifications could be toggled that would be handy.

Lastly, would there be any possibility of having the player's guide available in game somewhere? or heck, maybe getting the helper bot to read sections on request, since whilst I don't mind looking things up in the player's guide when I need to, it's a miner pest to have to change windows and navigate. Also, this might be a personal thing, but when I type the "help" command in a mud and get told "go look somewhere else" it always strikes me as a wee bit unfriendly.

Again, this is just a personal preference thing, and of course, obviously I'm using the mud interface here, not the website.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2020-03-26 01:42:58 (edited by TriadCity 2020-03-26 13:24:03)

Hiya, thanks for the suggestions, and here's some additional info:

Chat history: done. It's online now. Each chat command now has an -h flag to replay the most recent 10 messages on that channel, not counting your own.

Reply command: done. Online now.

If you could, in future it's helpful for the TriadCity community to post great suggestions like these to the Suggestions bulletin board on the SmartMonsters web site. That way everyone interested can reply with ideas for refinements, or point out problems we might not think of.

XP notices: we sortof thought it was annoying. But we could implement it with an on/off flag, so players have their choice. (This is an example of the kind of brainstorming that would ordinarily go in the forum.)

Re the Players' Guide in-game. It is - but not for MUD clients. Keep in mind, the TriadCity server, GUI client, and Web site were all designed to work together as a whole. For GUI users, when you ask the Help robot a question and it points you to additional info, it pops up a new browser window with the info right there. Adapting this for MUD clients has been problematic. The web pages are all HTML5, but there's enough nuance between them that simply having Help scrape them and display them as raw text turned out to be full of subtle glitches. This is the same problem we found when we tried to auto-translate the thousands of in-game signs like the ones in the vineyard, for example. We ended-up writing MUD versions of all of those signs, a significant project. We might end-up having to do the same for Players Guide content, the FAQ, MOTDs, and so on. But we'd like to find another way. So we need to brainstorm the best approach.

Lastly re Roles and Skills. You're experiencing the same growth of familiarity with TriadCity that everybody goes through with their first character. Many people decide to create new characters after a while, because, once familiar with the game world, the mechanics, and the complex interplay between options, they realize they could proceed in a more optimized way given what they now want to do. I encourage you to think of your first character as pure apprentice, without worrying too much about how it'll grow up. More generally, it might be helpful to suspend judgement at first about whether TriadCity is a MUD in the traditional sense, or something different. (Spoiler: it can be a MUD if you want it to. But it frequently deliberately subverts MUD conventions while trying to push the medium in new directions.)

Thanks again for the suggestions!

TriadCity home page
TriadCity on Facebook
TriadCity on Twitter
triadcity.smartmonsters.com 9095 [secure] 9094 [insecure]

2020-03-26 13:26:51

Thanks for adding the extra commands.
It's actually because I realise Triad city is so different to the traditional mud that I'm trying to take time getting involved with the game before writing up a database entry, so that I can give potential players a better overview of what the game experience is actually like, quite aside from being interested myself.

IN terms of help, actually since most mud clients have an interrupt feature, just having appropriate sections of the player's guide readable with a single command in the mud would be fine screen reader wise, indeed several muds implement players guides as books or other items and players just type "read page 1" or the like to have a different section printed to the screen, but I do realise that this would take a bit of extra chopping and changing, and manifestly would be a bit redundant for people using the browser client.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2020-04-25 17:38:28

Hi all, hope you're staying safe!

Over the summer we're going to prototype the new world we've brainstormed in this thread where sense of sight has never existed. It'll be small scale, with intention to grow in the fall if the prototype is successful. This'll be a world radically unlike anything we've ever heard of. For example there'll be no concept of moral alignment; instead the values that matter will be trust, glory, and shame - social values determined by relationship to the broader community. There may be a new sense we'll invent - we've talked about an ability to perceive and identify heat signatures with great accuracy - implying that cold things would be more difficult to differentiate, perhaps even becoming a source of fear or at least unease. Undecided, talking. I'll be working on it, along with a dedicated product manager, a squad of interns, and several volunteers. The new world may or may not include portals to and from TriadCity - not yet decided. Fortunately there's not that much new code required, as the TriadCity server platform is already incredibly detailed and quite easy to extend. Bulk of the work will go into writing the world's content.

This is an invite to participate. If you're interested, there's room not only for input and advice, but possibly also for writing, if writing is your thing. Unpaid 'cos we're dead broke, but, lots of sought-after spiffage usable in the new world and in TriadCity. If you're a university student we're happy to work with you and your school to structure internships. If you'd like to be involved, PM me and we'll take it from there.

Thanks! Stay safe!

--Mark

TriadCity home page
TriadCity on Facebook
TriadCity on Twitter
triadcity.smartmonsters.com 9095 [secure] 9094 [insecure]

2020-04-25 17:45:51

@TriadCity  please check your private
messages

Sentinel, out.
Contact me via telegram at t.me/velanGL, or through discord as azuremist. Do not pm me without informing me somewhere I need to read them as I do not check them and can't read the email this account is attached to

2020-06-04 22:56:42

Just bumping this thread. I’ve been playing and really enjoying Triad City for several weeks now. It’s a great escape, and a perfect way to pass all this time at home. Working my way up to Level 10 now. Come check it out if you haven’t already.

2021-02-14 12:02:22

Hi all:

Our forthcoming iOS client for TriadCity is now in late beta. If you're interested in helping test VoiceOver we'll be very grateful for your input. Drop me a PM here and I'll add you to the beta program. So far the feedback is enthusiastic! We look forward to yours!

TriadCity home page
TriadCity on Facebook
TriadCity on Twitter
triadcity.smartmonsters.com 9095 [secure] 9094 [insecure]

2021-02-14 13:22:35

will there be an android client as well?

2021-02-14 19:27:14

Hi, yes re Android. In the coming week, I think. I'll post a note here when it's ready. Thanks for your interest!

TriadCity home page
TriadCity on Facebook
TriadCity on Twitter
triadcity.smartmonsters.com 9095 [secure] 9094 [insecure]

2021-02-14 19:55:26

cool! will look forward

2021-02-15 09:23:20

Hi.
I don't think I've tried the mud yet. If I have, then it's very long time since I've tried it.
How would a mud client work with VOiceover on an iPhone? I think the text appears too fast to be useful on an iPhone for most muds, but maybe this mud is a slower mud. Also, how would you notice more text appears when writing on the build in keyboard on the touch screen?

Best regards SLJ.
Feel free to contact me privately if you have something in mind. If you do so, then please send me a mail instead of using the private message on the forum, since I don't check those very often.
Facebook: https://facebook.com/sorenjensen1988
Twitter: https://twitter.com/soerenjensen

2021-02-22 19:18:04

Hey @JasonBlaze, the Android clients for TriadCity and also our other games, Midgaard and Dungeon, are live in the Google Play Store. Big caveat emptor though: there's been absolutely zero accessibility testing (yet), so I can't vouch for the experience for VI users. If you check it out, send me a PM, let me know how it goes! Cheers!

TriadCity home page
TriadCity on Facebook
TriadCity on Twitter
triadcity.smartmonsters.com 9095 [secure] 9094 [insecure]

2021-10-25 00:37:12

Bumping this thread, because it looks like accessibility improvements have continued.
The last time I checked, a few neighborhoods were still not accessible, and now that number is down to only two or three.
Continued appreciation for the developers as they work to make this game fully accessible.
If you haven't played yet, this Mud is unlike anything I have found! It will appeal to those who like literary references, puzzles, pop culture, etc.

2021-10-25 23:18:43

I can only onnect on 9094 and it seems to not work sometimes, it acts like it's connected, if I hit enter it says connection closed, but doesn't show any words. I made a character fine but accadently made two accounts because I misunderstood char creation